The city says it has stopped the shipment of sludge cakes from this plant because of the high radioactive iodine concentration detected from the August 25 sample, but that the sludge cakes have been used as fertilizer material because the amount of radioactive cesium has been below the provisional safety limit for composts and manures (400 becquerels/kg).

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Please forgive my confusion, but perhaps someone could elaborate on the implications of this test. 187K is a great distance, and Iodine has a short half life. How did this material reach Oshu City -- via wind and weather? Has the plant been processing debris from Fukushima? Is there perhaps a local source, other than Fukushima?

Iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days, so after a month or so it becomes almost undetectable. The presence of iodine 131 means that fission is still occurring and the reactors are not under control at all.

This means the nuclear fuel that has melted down at Fukushima Daichi or Daini is actively fissioning again. Uncontained nuclear fission releases massive amounts of heat and radioactivity into the atmosphere. If the levels are so high 170km from the plant, how much higher must they be nearer the plant? This is disastrous news.

People should be taking emergency potassium iodide medicine. This should be a top news story in all the media today.

Any word on testing the local population for exposure? If this is fallout from Fukushima it indicates an unbelievably massive amount of source material was deposited in the area. This could be due to a large rain out concentration during the initial release. It has been about 180 days since the accident that works out to 22.5 half life cycles. 10 half life cycles is generally considered enough decay for most emissions. Hopefully there is a different explanation because if it is 6 month old fallout the locals are in for major thyroid problems in the future.

Makes you wonder just how contaminated the ocean actually is since it got the majority of the dose.

On 18Aug, Morioka shi, Iwate ken had more than double normal background radiation for a couple hours, but the peak was only 0.06uSv/H. Also on 18Aug, in Yuzawa shi, Akita ken, the background was double normal at 0.11uSv/H.Could there have been a corium event near this time frame that resulted in elevated I131?

Just looking at the time trends for Cs-137 and Cs-134 indicates that this is probably something else. If you have release of I-131 as a result of fission (i.e. from a nuclear reactor) you tend to have increased levels from the cesium isotopes as well. At another entry on this blog somebody linked to the CTBTO data for I-131 and Cs-137, there the peaks correlate very well for both isotopes:I-131: http://www.bfs.de/de/ion/imis/ctbto_aktivitaetskonzentrationen_jod.gifCs-137: http://www.bfs.de/de/ion/imis/ctbto_aktivitaetskonzentrationen_caesium.gif

It should be pointed out that they do have different melting and boiling temperatures (Iodine melts at 114 degrees C and boils at 184 deg C, Cesium melts at 28 deg C and boils at 671 deg C), which of course affects how much is released of each in liquid or gas form. So one could imagine scenarios where only Iodine is released when the temperature is not high enough to release significant amounts of Cesium. But it would show up at other places as well, are there any data?

My first guess was releases from any medical facility where I-131 is used for treatment. But then there would be continuous releases, this started suddenly (would be interesting to see older data).

So it could in fact be from a single patient, returning from a hospital in another city, going to the toilet. During an I-131 treatment the activity ingested is of the order of GBq, i.e. one billion Bq. The patient will excrete about half of that within the first 24 hours, and the urine may have an activity of several hundred kBq/ml. It would take several hundred cubic meters of water to dilute it to the observed levels in the sewage sludge, which is what happens when the urine goes through the sewer system.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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